Are your customers suddenly asking for a DXP instead of a CMS? Well, not surprising as also the analyst firms are pushing the ease of use for a delivery of quick digital experience building as the challenge of managing content is largely solved by giants such as Drupal. In this blogpost I’ll explain very briefly how you can set up a DXP using Open Source components.
What is it not?
Not just a bucket of products
Not just a website or an app
Not a tool
Not a one-way communication vehicle
Not standalone
Not IT nor Marketing system
Not a monolithic system
So now we have that out of the way. A DXP is not a single product. You can maybe compare it to the word website. It can mean anything as long as it is digital. A website meant that you had a place where you represented yourselves or shared information. A DXP is a place where your customers come to solve questions they have, in a digital form. There is a lot of research on this topic, but I’ll leave it to you, the reader, to dig in a bit deeper. I imagine you would get overloaded if you would google “what is a website” as well 🙂
Drupal is also moving forward with its content management capabilities and the video below shows how a content editor would work with Drupal to create rich landing pages. That said, Drupal is still missing many other capabilities that needs to be augmented with tools in the same ecosystem to become a DXP building solution.
What are we missing?
- Customer Data Platform
- Personalisation
- Consent management
If we trim it down to practical capabilities we are missing a tool in our toolset for the above 3 cases. In the video below I’m demoing how this can be solved by utilizing the power of Apache Unomi. Next to that we can augment our toolset towards marketing automation with Mautic.
How can you do this yourselves?
Which (open) tools are needed to build a DXP on top of Drupal
Mautic Marketing Automation
Mautic is a fully-featured cross-channel orchestration solution that enables organizations of all sizes to orchestrate and deliver individually personalized experiences at scale. Mautic helps teams gather important contact information, optimize and template campaigns, and report on results. No other solution compares to Mautic’s modern and flexible design which provides team members the freedom to move quickly and adapt easily to changing business needs.
Apache Unomi
Apache Unomi™: The Open Source Customer Data Platform Apache Unomi™ (pronounced “You know me”) is a Java Open Source customer data platform, a Java server designed to manage customers, leads and visitors data and help personalize customers experiences while also offering features to respect visitor privacy rules (such as GDPR)
Drupal
Drupal is an open source platform for building amazing digital experiences. It’s made by a dedicated community. Anyone can use it, and it will always be free.
Unomi Drupal Module
This module connects your site to the API of Unomi. It allows a pluggable authentication strategy to support local Unomi’s or hosted Unomi services like Dropsolid Platform.
Mautic Form Embedding
This module allows you to select forms from a chosen Mautic instance and display on your Drupal 8 website. It allows you to choose between multiple authentication methods to get the list of forms.
Dropsolid Rocketship Drupal Distribution
The intent of Dropsolid Rocketship is to make digital business easy by providing a framework and best practice examples based on real life situations from a company that has built and managed over 500 Drupal sites.
Dropsolid Rocketship is a distribution that enables small to mid-market business to profit from an optimal start when getting your feet wet in Drupal. It provides best practices from deployment, configuration and ways to extend it, proven by many cases that have implemented and resulted in this learning.
All Drupal 8 sites at Dropsolid have Rocketship at its core. Junior developers learn the basics with Rocketship, while senior developers have had their say in how an optimal development codebase looks like.
As it is our goal to make digital business easy, there is no better way than being transparent in how we achieve that.
Dropsolid Rocketship GDPR Cookie Compliance
Privacy regulations are becoming more and more strict and with that also the way of handling cookie consent on websites. It’s not enough anymore to have a cookie notification bar, visitors should be able to give consent on specific types of cookies that are being stored when visiting a website.
There are many third-party solutions with subscription models to plug into a website, but the standard that we use is a Drupal module, so that it’s a part of the Drupal solution we provide and if required we can tailor it further to the needs of the client if required.
Dropsolid has decided to contribute to the EU Cookie Compliance (GDPR Compliance) module on drupal.org and co-maintain this module in the future.
Dropsolid Platform for AI segmentation
All of your interaction data are stored in a universal visitor profile. The data are available to create segments. These, in turn, can be used to personalize interactions, across all channels. Segments are available out-of-the-box in Drupal’s page builder and Mautic’s email and marketing content builders.
The related Customer Data Platform, Unomi, is secure, scalable and is able to handle vasts quantities of data. Our AI engine is able to detect behavioural patterns from these data and is able to label visitors in real time according to its AI-defined segments. This allows for further personalization.
Data capture is easy: it only takes one tracking script on your website, comparable to a Google Analytics integration. You could be gathering relevant data within minutes of reading this page. Sounds interesting? See for yourself!
Need help? Happy to assist you.